Quite a few players in my guild work for Blizzard, so I took the information as trustworthy, if not secondhand. If that is not the case then that's great, because then we can start selling our teams again

What they did was make it so both your teams rating and your personal rating have to be 1850/2000 to get the items, only change in how you sell an arena team is that someone else has to power the teams rating up to 1850/2000.

Maybe I'm a bit out of the loop, as I don't really dabble in the arenas since my daughter was born. If you're boosting your personal rating to 1850 or so using the method above by tanking the rating with alts and raising it with mains, is your personal rating lost if you left the team that is ~1500?

If you keep your personal rating after switching teams, couldn't you use the method above to get a fairly high rating and then just have that person quit their team (retaining their 1850+ rating) and join a team that's 1850-2000 and be able to purchase the items that they were looking for? Or is there a failsafe in there which puts your rating back down to 1500 when you leave a team or join another?

I don't know if that sounds completely backward, and the whole talk of boosting teams and such might deserve to be in another topic? You can delete this if it's a question that's completely off base.

This is how it works.

Cool, thank you for the clarification on that. It's been a while since I've really pvp'd at all.

Ahh I wondered how it worked. I havent played 3's for a few weeks and 4 out of 10 games last night were against point sellers ie S3 weapon,S3 Shoulders taking 18 pts off us at 1700 etc.

Or how few people it takes to control the market I know with JCing on my server there is only a few "regular" players, everyone else seems to sell things for about 2 weeks and then stop.

Been watching this thread for a while now, want to thank everyone for their input

Using some of the methods mentioned above, I managed to go from ~1000g -> 7500g in about 3 weeks.

Can't recommend enough the JC/Prospect method of making gold. This alone would have made me almost 5000g in that 3 week period. (Was lucky with the arena s3 rush and the xmas holidays, etc)

Over that time, I also managed to get almost all BOE JC cuts, so in truth the figure was probably closer to 10000g.

Thanks again to everyone who posted useful info!!

The most profitable thing to sell is what everyone else isn't. I generally cycle between flasks and jewelcrafting cuts, and when both of those get saturated I'll work through my backlog of Azeroth materials for things like Steel Weapon Chains or level 20 to 50 crafted blues. The more alt professions you have, the more resilience you have against market crashes. There is a point where it just isn't worth the time though. You could easily spend 6 hours a day trying to make absolutely everything that would make a profit, and I don't love the Auction House THAT much.

I usually have a pretty good in-game cash-flow however this past week I spent 2300g on the plans for Adamantite Weapon Chain thinking I'd have a great chance to make some huge coin. Being the only person on the server with these plans I thought I was off to the races...however nobody has even bought one yet. The only bright side is that since I bought the plans and the chains haven't been selling I've been doing dailies again on both of my 70s. In 2 hours time I can easily get all 20 done between the two characters and I've made a good chunk of the 2300g initial price tag back.

If you are having troubles with material costs for some items, try checking with your guild to see if anyone has any of the items stockpiled that just isn't selling them.

I was able to find people in my guild who had 5+ stacks of Adamantite Powder lying in their bank that they were willing to send me for 8g/stack. Even paying 3.5-4g per Primal Earth and 20g per stack of Eternium Ore, I'm still able to turn an incredible profit with Braided Eternium Chains. I've usually farmed everything in the past, but I haven't been out mining recently on my main character, but even buying everything on the AH, I'm still making ~40-50% profit buying out the raw materials and making/de'ing items seems profitable still on my server because of the stable cost of Large Prismatic Shards. I ended up putting 23 of them up last night in stacks of 4, 2, or singles. These amounts always seem to sell quite well for me, as it really sets the groups in amounts that are purchasable for enchants. I can't think of the last time that I went more than 24 hours without all of them being bought out, though I do price them at a fairly low bid price of 27g and BO of 29-30g depending on how many are on AH.

I want to think that if the shards ever dropped below 25-27g each, I would have to reconsider how much I'm really getting out of my work.

I will give another tip, that it seems some people just aren't utilizing to help with their profits. Try not to buy things out. I can generally save quite a bit of money when buying materials in bulk. Given that this doesn't generally work with things such as Netherweave, but when buying things like Adamantite Ore that may have a 1-3g lower bid price over buyout, just put a bid on it if it's above what you would generally pay. A little patience seems to go a HUGE distance in stretching profit margins when buying raw materials from the AH.

Now if I could only put forth the time to really do some mining and pump out some good profit to pick up some more BoE JC patterns.

Anyone have advice on how to set up and operate a cross-faction AH transfer operation? I am on a PvE server with a HUGE Alliance population compared to Horde and our AH is rather bare - I certainly believe I can make some good money moving items between AH's. I have my account and my wife's account in which to setup characters.

I made a Gnome and ran it to IF - but curious as to the way people have set this up in the past and any tips/hints to pull it off effectively.

One thing would be to make a mage, and level him to 20, so you get teleports to IF/SW, then bind inside a town that has a neutral AH(bootybay, gadgetzan and erm... I think there was a 3rd one, but can't remember it right now). You could also swim a LONG time along the west coast, toward the south, until you reach bootybay, and use the flightpath. You do need a bit of money to start it though, because you'll have to setup an auction on the neutral AH(which has a higher fee) with your alliance alt, so you can buy it with your main and get money on your alliance alt, that's why a level 20mage is probably a good idea, it only takes a few hours if you know what you're doing.

Think Winterspring has one too, but I've never spent much time there so I wouldn't swear by it. If you were going to be time efficient, just make 2 alts, park one in a Capital city and one in a neutral city with an AH, and then send stuff that way. Then you wouldn't have to level anyone to 20. You'd have to make sure you're making pretty decent bank though, because those bloody AH goblins are greedy bastards, and will take a decent chunk for every transfer.

You'll want a AH alt of each faction in one of the cities with a neutral AH. BB is fairly easy to get to, you can swim / water walk and bypass the nasties. You'll want to be able to list something on one faction for a low price and immediately buy it out on the other so you'll want to look into having two copies of WoW running on the same computer or where you can have your wife immediately buy it out. Note that people can and have lost gold doing this, there are rumors of AH bots scanning and immediately buying low priced auctions. I've done it a number of times without a problem though.

Your server imbalance sounds like Proudmoore, you might find that the number of people playing on Alliance side have inflated prices compared to Horde. Look for rare high ticket items and watch pricing on both sides. I completed my JC pattern collection on my priest by buying some patterns and moving them through the neutral AH. I also completed my Blessings Deck by watching both auction houses. So recipes, cards, etc will be places to start watching.

Items that differ between the factions for various reasons are a great place to make some gold. Back in WoW 1.0 I'd sell all the Shaman T0 drops through the neutral AH for much more than I'd get on the Alliance AH. TBC made up much of those differences but I know that Dark Runes are used for the BE Paladin quest and are in much higher demand Horde side than Alliance side. If there are more of these kinds of things, find them and make some G!

Two accounts, four characters. Let's call them Alliance Ironforge (AI), Alliance Gadgetzan (AG), Horde Gadgetzan (HG), and Horde Orgrimmar (HO). AI and AG are on one account, HG and HO are on the other account. Really helps if you can dualbox.

AI buys in Ironforge and mails to AG.

Now, get AG and HG at the neutral AH, list AG's item for 10c or whatever and immediately buy it with HG. This is where you can mess up - someone can see the 10c item and buy it. Dualboxing obviously helps here. Setting a high price is problematic because the Gadgetzan AH takes 15% off transactions.

Once HG has the item, mail to HO and list in Orgrimmar.

It's more difficult to make money on the bare Hordeside AH than you might think because the market for your goods is small.

There are scammers using bottom scanner and auto clicker mods making a killing from cross faction AHs so be very careful when doing faction swapping of items for low prices.
Nothing delights a scammer more than a blinkstrike for 10c I'm sure.

(Last time i post so late, sorry for missing a capital letter! )

Explain as to why that is scamming please.

I think it is the fact they are using autoclicker mods so that they can do it without being at the keyboard.

Probably not a good thing to say, as Blizzard employees can get in trouble for letting others know what they do for a living in game. Now, I doubt that the "powers that be" regularly browse these forums looking for stuff like that, but you never know when they may want to make an example out of one of your guild buddies.

Well, I have 2 computers in the same room and can also run 2 copies of WoW on my computer with ease so that is not a problem. Also its a PvE server and I have access to 2 accounts, so I can have any character in any city on any faction really.

My server is a relatively low pop/backwater, with pretty slow progression (2 Horde guilds killed Kael, no one past mid BT and no Archimonde ... 2 Alliance Illidan guilds, another deep BT and another early BT) relative to most so I doubt there would be many out running things like that.

I could work out myself how to best get a Horde character to a neutral AH, but I would have no idea as to the most efficient method for Alliance (Zepps > Boats! I'm a Mage, I haven't used public transport in over 200 days played) - I could probably figure it out, but I am damn lazy after one of the busiest days in my life and I need some sleep ... hoping for someone to work it out for me when I read this thread next.

I make a Troll/Orc, swim to ratchet and take the boat to booty bay.
Walking to the "sea" in durator is a bit risky, but its the fastest way